Fun with LiveData (Android Dev Summit ’18)

LiveData is a simple observable data holder that is aware of the lifecycle of the observers. It was designed to avoid memory leaks and null pointer exceptions between an activity or fragment and a ViewModel.

However, you can also use LiveData beyond the ViewModel. Components like Room or Workmanager also expose LiveData observables, and you can make your own data sources lifecycle-aware.

In this talk, we’ll deep dive into patterns with LiveData such as the different types of transformations (map, switchMap and MediatorLiveData), handling events and building reactive architectures as well as common antipatterns and code-smells to avoid.

Testing Android Apps at Scale with Nitrogen (Android Dev Summit ’18)

Writing tests is a fundamental part of developing Android applications. Recent improvements to Android’s testing APIs make it straightforward to write tests, yet it is incredibly hard to run tests at scale. In this session we give an overview of project Nitrogen, the new Android test harness, which helps developers to scale their testing with support for test setup, execution, device management and reporting.

ConstraintLayout Deep Dive (Android Dev Summit ’18)

In this session you will learn best practices of using ConstraintLayout on Android, particularly covering tips and tricks in the Layout Editor and new features introduced in the 2.0 version. We will go over how to take advantage of those to create UI more efficiently.

How to Kotlin – from the Lead Kotlin Language Designer (Google I/O ’18)

Kotlin is similar to the Java programming language, so it’s natural that your Kotlin code looks very much like Java code when you are first start to use the language. While this is fine to begin with, you’re probably not taking full advantage of all the language benefits. In this session, the lead Kotlin language designer will show you how you can write more idiomatic Kotlin, what the benefits are, and help you discover some of the most powerful yet lesser known features of Kotlin.

It’s been 10 years since the first Android device launch, and even experienced Android developers are still using tools, APIs, and best-practices from 2008. The return of Android Protips brings you up-to-speed on modern solutions to Android development challenges, highlights cutting-edge features, and calls out deprecated app design / implementation patterns. These protips will bring your skills into the next decade of Android development.